April 27, 2009 9:56 am

Here’s a video clip from our discussion with Seattle Seahawks general manager Tim Ruskell on the team rescinding the franchise tag from linebacker Leroy Hill.

As reported earlier, Ruskell said the team made the move in large part because they drafted linebacker Aaron Curry, and along with the rest of the rookies they drafted and free agents they signed, the need the cap room for flexibility.

However, Ruskell did say the team is still negotiating with Hill, and that the 26-year-old linebacker indicated through a conversation with Mora that Hill still wants to remain a Seahawk.

Ruskell went on to say the franchise tag actually hindered instead of helped negotiations, which he explains below

“That’s kind of the negative part of the franchise tag,” Ruskell said. “It doesn’t promote getting a deal done. It kind of dis-promotes it, because of the exorbitant price tag that’s on it.

“People really don’t know what to do. The tag has not always been a positive on, for us and for a lot of teams. It’s a strange tool. You go into it thinking that if you do this, then this will happen, and quite often that does not happen, for whatever the tag is. I think both sides would agree to that, that it didn’t promote getting a deal done in a timely fashion, so that Leroy could be here to learn this new offense, which is what we wanted. We were hoping that is what would happen. It did not. We’re trying this now.”

The Seahawks are bringing in Curry this morning, so I’ll have a report soon after the press conference.

Here’s my report from the second day of the draft, which includes bios on each player.

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About

Gregg Bell joined The News Tribune in July 2014. Bell had been the director of writing for the University of Washington's athletic department for four years. He was the senior national sports writer in Seattle for The Associated Press from 2005-10, covering the Seahawks in their first Super Bowl season and beyond. He's also been The Sacramento Bee's beat writer on the Oakland Athletics and Raiders. The native of Steubenville, Ohio, is a 1993 graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., and a 2000 graduate of the University of California, Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism.

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